Miscellany: Settlers of Catan

I don't have any studies to back it up, but it's pretty clear to me that American board games are in a funk. Aside from recent successes like Cranium, it's been awhile since family board games were anything more than an exercise forced on the kids in order to spend some "quality time" away from the computer and the TV. This is unfortunate, but help may be on the way in the form of European-style board games like Settlers of Catan (SoC for short).

In SoC, you place settlements and roads on a randomly generated board of hexagonal terrain tiles. As players roll dice, you collect resources using these settlements and gradually build up your civilization - first player to 10 Victory Points wins. Since you rarely have everything you need to build, and since there's no way to directly harm your competition, the game turns on your skills at trading, diplomacy, and settlement placement.

SoC is more than a decade old, but continues to draw in new players like myself. The rules are simple enough that the basics can be explained in ten minutes, the game has enough random chance involved to allow players of less skill to hang with (and beat) experienced competition, but there are enough wrinkles so that the game isn't turn-after-turn boring like Monopoly. It's definitely a "casual" game, as luck plays a pretty large role in determining the outcome, but it's heavier than something like "Sorry" or even "Backgammon."

SoC is just one of a huge series of innovative new board games, primarily from Germany but now being designed around the world. I plan to buy and play many more games like this in the future - look for the results on this site.

Miscellany: Coup card game review

Whenever my sister and her husband come down, we break out the board games. Mostly we play "light" Euro strategy - stuff like Catan and Carcassonne - but sometimes there's just not enough time to roll dice or lay tiles.  For quick hits of gaming, we turn to "party" style card games like Coup.

In Coup, each player controls two character cards with unique powers (the Duke, for instance, allows you to take more money from the treasury than normal). The rub is that your character cards are hidden from everyone else, so you can fool people into thinking you have powers that you really don't. Be careful, though - if someone correctly calls your bluff, you lose one of your cards. If you accuse someone of bluffing but are wrong, you lose a card, too.

Coup is not terribly deep, and often very dependent on luck. However, the bluff mechanic holds up well whether you are playing once or twice (games last 10 minutes tops) or over and over again. For the price and size of the game, it's a fun, surprisingly social game.

Miscellany: Carcassonne review

The best European-style board games tap into the intrinsic fun of building things. I guess there's just something fundamentally satisfying about laying your railroad routes in "Ticket to Ride" or plopping down cities in "Settlers of Catan." Some American games do have the same mechanic, but they also usually introduce an element of capitalist risk: you can go bankrupt and lose all your property in "Monopoly," for instance. With Eurogames, no matter how poorly you play, the things you set down usually persist.

"Carcassonne," designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, is one of the most popular Eurogames, and it makes bulding the gameworld the central focus of play. "Carcassonne" won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award in 2001, and a seemingly endless tide of expansion sets, standalone semi-sequels, and spinoffs have kept the game at the forefront of the casual German-style board game community to this day.

The rules are pretty simple. Each player takes turns placing square land tiles. There are several possible landscape features - cities, roads, fields, etc. - and each new tile must correspond to what is already in play. After laying down the tile, you can "claim" it by placing a follower on it. Complete any terrain feature that includes a square with your follower on it and you get points.

In spite of its tactical simplicity and heavy dependence on luck, "Carcassonne" is fun for all ages because laying out the game's "board" is so tactile. The heavy cardboard land tiles look appealing and have a pleasing texture. The little wooden follower figurines (nicknamed "meeple") are cute and well-made. Even the game's scorecard is interesting - you place a token on a continously numbered track instead of merely jotting down your score:



"Carcassonne" is often cited as a "gateway game" to introduce newcomers to European-style board games, but it's fun in its own right, too. So, if you're in the mood for a (very) light strategy game that the whole family can play, you pretty much can't go wrong with "Carcassonne" or one of its many progeny.

Miscellany: Cranium WOW first impressions

When it comes to board games, my friends and I tend to play European-style strategy titles like "Settlers of Catan" or "Tigris and Euphrates." My sister's friends, though, are more into conventional party board games. We had a group of her buddies over at our place one night, and we started a little 2 vs. 2 vs. 2 vs. 2 game of Cranium WOW.

I never played the original Cranium, but this new edition seems to preserve everything that made the first iteration so popular. Cranium is sort of like Trivial Pursuit, except it mixes in elements from other games like Pictionary and charades. This kind of magpie mentality means that people who are wonderful artists or actors have a chance against people with encyclopedic knowledge.

It was pretty fun, but there are some stumbling blocks. In game balance terms, somebody who isn't familiar with American pop culture is going to be at a serious disadvantage. Additionally, the sheer randomness of the clues and questions means that you might find one team getting easy chestnuts while the others get thrown for a loop.

Miscellany: Puerto Rico

If there's one board game that embodies the Eurogaming scene, it's "Puerto Rico." The game, designed by Andreas Seyfarth, spent a lot of time at the #1 spot at boardgamegeek.com. It was eventually dethroned by farm simulator Agricola, but it's still a good choice if you start to get tired of "Settlers of Catan."

The premise doesn't sound too gripping at first: you play as a plantation owner in the colony of Puerto Rico in the 17th century. During the game, you'll acquire colonists and grow crops; each player chooses a role, takes an action with a special privilege, and then all other players take the same action without the privilege. To get victory points, you either ship crops to the Old World or buy buildings, or both, depending on your strategy.

The fun comes after the first few playthroughs, which will most likely be spent blundering through the poorly written rulebook (translated from the German). The only random element in the game are the plantation tiles that appear, and even those can be predicted (the higher value crops are slightly more rare), so it's very easy to formulate and execute a plan to succeed.

There are a bunch of possibilities. Will you try to ship as much corn as possible to the Old World, using your private ship and warehouses to protect your precious grain? Or maybe you'll become a coffee baron, using the riches from the sales of the crop to fund a massive series of building projects? Perhaps you'll diversify, producing and shipping at opportune times and using the Factory building to increase your production profits?

It's really the buildings that make the whole thing go, since each building allows you to break the rules in various ways. This sort of exception-based design can be very compelling if executed correctly (see "Magic: The Gathering" and "Guilty Gear" for prime examples), so it's no surprise "Puerto Rico" is popular.

[One sidenote - the game's "colonists" are dark brown circular discs, and given the real-life history of Puerto Rico, they should have probably been called "slaves." I don't like it when games whitewash history like this.]

Miscellany: Lords of Waterdeep review

 

"Lords of Waterdeep" is a Dungeons & Dragons-flavored board game set in the city of Waterdeep. As one of the titular Lords, each player competes for influence and power within the city by hiring adventurers (i.e., fighters, rogues, clerics, and wizards), creating buildings, and completing quests. At the end of the game, a player gets a victory point for each hired adventurer, victory points for completed quests, and a special victory point bonus depending on which Lord they are playing as (which is kept secret from the other players). The player with the most victory points wins:

 

 

 

 

 

At first glance, it seems fairly odd to graft a European-style boardgame design onto the D&D license. After all, D&D is all about exploring dungeons, fighting monsters, and looting treasure. These concepts typically don't work inside a Eurogame framework, which eschews player elimination and direct competition. "Lords" avoids these pitfalls because it's really a resource management game. Though the D&D stuff isn't exactly ignored (each quest, building, and card is appropriately flavored), the game mechanics boil down to who can accumulate resources and spend them in the most efficient way.

To this end, each player gets a limited number of actions and makes interesting choices each turn: do you spend your time hiring new adventurers? Grabbing new quests to undertake? Building stuff that'll make it easier to hire more adventurers later? Hindering your opponents? This is all cerebral fun, but it's maybe not the bloodletting or treasure-hunting some people expect from a D&D-based game.

Bottom line: if you like Eurogames like "Settlers of Catan," you'll probably like "Lords of Waterdeep." There's a certain satisfaction in completing big expensive quests (like raiding the Undermountain), and you seldom feel like you're losing so badly that you can't recover. Plus, the components here are excellent, with a nice gameboard representing the city, good artwork on the cards (hey, it's Wizards of the Coast), and even a great box insert that keeps all the little tokens and cards organized. However, if you're looking for a game with hitpoints, armor, damage, or even monsters, look elsewhere.

School: The Last Day of Classes

The 1L experience is something that I'll probably never forget. It's been a long time since I've been stuck in the same classes with people for the whole year. The undergrad years were obviously all over the place, as everyone had a different schedule. The first year of law school, though, really did remind me of high school - sitting in the same chair, day after day, and hanging out between classes with "the usual suspects."

The year went by really quick. We lost a good person along the way, we went through the shock of first-semester finals, and we settled in for the spring doldrums. I asked Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg a question, I washed dishes at a homeless shelter, I heard all manner of guest speakers and lecturers, and played countless games of Munchkin and Settlers of Catan during the lunch break.

Today was our last day of classes together as Section 2. We'll all be scattered from now on, mixed in with the other 1L sections. There was applause at the end of each class today (except for Prof. Collier's, which I thought was rude), and a sense of finality. I think our first semester professors were more engaging than this semester's crop. Now it's time for the last hurrah, spring finals.